Full text: The Right to Development: China's Philosophy, Practice and Contribution(5)

The government strives to strengthen the effectiveness of legal aid, and ensures the right of impoverished people to judicial relief. In 1994, China began to form a legal aid system, providing free consultation, agency, criminal defense, and other legal services to people in need. In 2003, the State Council issued the Regulations on Legal Aid to define the scale of legal aid, delegating the power to the people's governments of provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the central government to supplement the issues to be covered by legal aid, and set the standards for receiving legal aid in light of the local conditions. Currently there are 23 provinces that have expanded the scope of issues covered by legal aid, and 19 provinces have adjusted the standards for receiving legal aid. The Criminal Procedural Law (revised in 2012) included suspects as recipients of legal aid, alongside defendants. Over the past five years, the number of legal aid cases has been growing by 11.4 percent annually, and women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and rural migrant workers have received timely and higher quality legal aid services. In May 2015, at its 12th meeting, the CPC Central Leading Group for Overall and Further Reforms reviewed and approved the "Opinions on Improving the Legal Aid System," with measures to further enlarge the coverage of legal aid for civil and administrative lawsuits, reduce the thresholds for receiving legal aid, and gradually make legal aid available to low-income groups to benefit people in need.

The government strengthens judicial remedy to protect the right to development of disadvantaged groups. China has always attached importance to the judicial protection of the right to development and other basic human rights in criminal cases. The state punishes crimes targeted at women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and rural migrant workers, and strengthens the protection of special groups' rights to healthy physical and psychological development and their economic and social rights. The government strives to prevent or severely punish the abduction and trafficking of women and children, and such crimes have been effectively curbed. The state has issued the "Opinions on Punishing Sex Crimes Against Minors" and the "Opinions on Handling the Infringements of Minors' Rights and Interests by Guardians," so as to enhance the judicial protection of minors' rights and interests. The state has promulgated the "Opinions on Safeguarding the Legitimate Rights and Interests of Disabled Persons in Procuratorial Work," mandating severe punishment for crimes that infringe upon the rights and interests of disabled people in accordance with the law.

The government attaches importance to the role of arbitration, and protects the equal right to development of certain groups. By ending disputes through arbitration and punishing infringements according to law, China endeavors to strengthen procedure-based protection of the people's rights. By the end of 2015, 80 percent of township- and community-level employment and social security centers had set up organizations to mediate labor disputes, up by 14 percent from the 2014 figure. A total of 2,919 administrative divisions at or above county level (about 91 percent of the total) had arbitration offices for labor disputes, up by 208 percent compared with the figure of 946 at the end of the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010). In 2010-2015, China's mediation and arbitration organizations handled a total of 7.57 million cases, bringing 90 percent to a conclusion.

xIII. Effectively Realizing Economic Development

China always considers economic development as the central task, laying a solid foundation for safeguarding the right to development. At the same time economic development is strengthened by safeguarding the people's right to development. Since the reform and opening-up policy was launched in 1978, China has witnessed rapid economic growth, and has become the world's second largest economy. There have been two historic leaps in living standards, from living in poverty to having access to basic material needs, and then to moderate prosperity.

The right to subsistence of the poor is effectively guaranteed. The poverty reduction campaign in China is the most significant sign of China's progress in human rights. Since the end of 1978, China has realized "the most rapid large-scale poverty reduction in human history over the last 25 years."[Note: "Reducing Poverty on a Global Scale: Learning and Innovating for Development Findings from the Shanghai Global Learning Initiative," a World Bank document on Nov. 14, 2016.] According to the existing rural poverty standards, it has reduced the number of those living in poverty by more than 700 million, which is more than the total population of the United States, Russia, Japan and Germany, and cut the rate of poverty to 5.7 percent, becoming the first country to complete the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. By the end of 2015, the number of rural people living in poverty had fallen to 55.75 million. In the five autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Tibet, Ningxia and Xinjiang, and in the provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, and Qinghai, where ethnic minorities are concentrated, the number of rural people living in poverty had fallen to 18.13 million. China's poverty reduction campaign has effectively contributed to granting its disadvantaged people the right to development, laying a solid foundation for the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects. In November 2015, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the "Decision on Winning the Tough Battle Against Poverty," making comprehensive arrangements for poverty eradication work in the following five years. In March 2016, the "Outline of the 13th Five-Year Program for the National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China" was published, in which the Chinese government made strategic plans for the full implementation of the overall goal of poverty eradication. In order to realize the ambitious goal of relieving the rural poor population of poverty by 2020, China is carrying out a basic strategy of targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty eradication.(mo